Marginalization Of Blacks In The “Color-Blind” America(1985-2015)

In the post-civil rights America, few white Americans would like to think of themselves as racists. When accused of racists, they are always ready to retort by saying that they even elected a black president. Compared to the slavery era and Jim Crow era, there is no doubt that blacks have made tremendous progress in racial equality in the past decades. The civil rights movement succeeded in eradicating most formal, legal, and other institutionalized forms of racism, from segregated schools, jobs, housing, and public facilities to anti-miscegenation laws which forbade interracial sex or marriage.Yet racism in modern America is still well and alive in the so-called “colorblind” era, only practiced in more subtle and hidden ways. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva stated in Racism without Racists, “color-blind racism became the dominant racial ideology as the mechanisms and practices for keeping blacks and other racial minorities ‘at the bottom of the well' changed…… Contemporary racial inequality is reproduced through ‘new racism' practices that are subtle, institutional, and apparently nonracial.”Residential segregation, cultural homicide, racial profiling and economic inequality, which are almost as prevalent today as they were in the past, are no longer accomplished through overtly discriminatory practices. Instead, covert behaviors are new ways of practicing “new racism”, such as presenting negative portrayals of blacks, not showing all the available unite, advertising jobs in mostly white networks and newspapers, stopping blacks when they are driving, or incarcerating a large proportion of blacks and labeling them “criminals” to marginalize them. In a word, new racism, unlike traditional racial discrimination, manifests itself in more subtle but equally effective ways, maintaining the relatively poorer economic and lower social status of African Americans.